The
Zalman CNPS6500B-Cu is frankly one of the largest Pentium 4 heatsinks
on the market, weighing in at 898grams. That is frighteningly close to 1 kilo!
Bu, putting the high weight factor aside, all that copper, and all that surface area
conspire to make one very effective low noise heatsink.

With the CNPS6500B revision Zalman have changed
around how the heatsink mounts to the Intel Pentium 4 processor. In the past,
the heatsink was attached via a series of screws and nuts which basically meant
that you had to first remove the entire motherboard from the case before you
could install the heatsink.

That is a pretty labor intensive job just for a
heatsink, so Zalman went back to the drawing board as it were and came up with a
very simple set of plastic springy clips which latch into the existing pentium 4
heatsink retention mechanism and hold the CNPS6500B-Cu in place.

The mounting system works well, but with that much
copper on the processor it is still a good idea for first remove the heatsink
before transporting your computer around.

The easiest way to improve the performance of a heatsink
is to increase the amount of air moving through its fins. This is not the
best way to improve a heatsink, but it is the easiest, and most common
method.

To this
effect, computers have been increasingly getter louder and louder. In most situations we are apt to grin and bear it
- tucking the computer under a table or putting headphones on and turning up the
music. This is where Zalman steps in with their "CNPS"
acronym for "Computer Noise Prevention System." In addition to the large 92mm
fan that comes with the CNPS6500B-Cu, they also include the FanMate
1. The FanMate 1 allows you to further decrease the
degree of noise generated by the fan, by lowering the amount of voltage it
receives, and in turn how fast it rotates.

The Fan
Mate 1 is rated to handle fans drawing 6W or less (via a three-pin power
connector), and will output from between 12V to 5V depending on where the dial
is set. The flower heatsinks comes with a 92mm fan on a adjustable
armature. The mounting arm attaches to the case by using the first three slot
card screw positions and a 25cm long fan wire plugs directly into the
motherboard to offer RPM monitoring.